Navigation

We are about one year away from the Unix’s 35th birthday, but I recently enjoyed going through this piece from the 25th anniversary. I especially enjoyed the parts about how Unix was governed, and the way that its origins influenced its organizing structure in later years:

The general attitude of AT&T toward Unix–“no advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance”–made it necessary for users to band together….

The decision on the part of the AT&T lawyers to allow educational institutions to receive Unix but to deny support or bug fixes had an immediate effect: It forced the users to share with one another. They shared ideas, information, programs, bug fixes, and hardware fixes….

[Bill] Joy began producing the BSD Berkeley Software Distribution. It was first offered in March 1978. The license was on one side of a sheet of paper….

The fact that the BSD release had a simple license agreement, credited those who produced the software, and was priced at the actual cost of the media and distribution exemplifies what was best about Unix in its first decade and what made it such a popular operating system….

Sunil Das, of City University, London, notes that “technically, Unix is a simple, coherent system that pushes a few good ideas to the limit.” But let history not forget that some of those ideas had nothing to do with operating systems; they had to do with sharing, collaboration, and the user-driven evolution of technology supported by a capable, concerned pan-corporate community of developers and users.